Gifts of Sisterhood: Journey from Grief to Gratitude

By Patricia L Brooks

We give and receive gifts, but the gifts that keep on giving - Faith, Courage, Love, Friendship, Happiness and Acceptance - are the gifts her youngest sister gave so freely. Too often it takes a life changing experience to recognize what we already have, affirm what we already know, welcome what is given to us and share it with others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brooks Goldmann Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Dec 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781088038277

Book preview

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Twenty Years Later

Prologue 2011

Preface

1. The Gift of Compassion

2. The Gift of Freedom

3. The Gift of Friendship

4. The Gift of Love

5. The Gift of Contentment

6. The Gift of Tolerance

7. The Gift of Hope

8. The Gift of Patience

9. The Gift of Courage

10. The Gift of Gratitude

11. The Gift of Acceptance

12. The Gift of Faith

13. The Gift of Happiness

14. My Gift to Her: Taking Her Spirit Home to Ireland

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The Journey from Grief to Gratitude, Workshop Handout

Stop Smoking, Sister!

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Many wonderful people contributed in various ways to the debut of this book. Some directly in the editing and publishing process, and others by just being in my life as a friend and confidante listening as I struggled to tell this story from my heart. It is with this book I hereby acknowledge all of you for your support and trust, patience and understanding that I would do my best. Thank you for being there for me.

I especially want to acknowledge my editor for her valuable assistance during the writing of this book. This work would not have been completed without her editorial expertise. My appreciation of her goes far beyond our business relationship. Her encouragement during many days when I needed a friend will always be remembered. She helped my words come alive by letting me know I had something valuable to say about my sister’s spirit and she enhanced that spirit.

Thank you to my husband, who stood by me night after night as I hid out in my office writing and revising, planning and praying over this piece of work to come to fruition. Thank you to him as well for critiquing this book with love and kindness and journeying with me to Ireland to write the last chapter and take my sister’s spirit home to our roots.

I am grateful to my family; including my two other sisters shown on this cover. And especially to my parents for raising us in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where we still have access to our family home. They gave me the perfect backdrop for this book and for her to be laid to rest. The memories and the stories that surround those days and our lives there will always be cherished parts of my life. Yes, we can go home, visit my sister’s resting garden, and grow old together.

Thank you to those who have supported me in writing critique groups along the way. Your guidance and ideas on this path to publishing my first memoir helped me in more ways than I even know. Your continued faith in me is truly invaluable.

Most especially, I acknowledge my youngest sister, Roberta, for whom this book is written and dedicated with love and pride. This insightfulness and outpouring of my heart and soul would have happened no other way. She had to agree to this writing and be here in spirit, too, as I worked on each page.

She will forever be my hero and my companion as I practice the Journey from Grief to Gratitude by continuing to take her with me in spirit. She is in my heart when I do my workshops on grief recovery using this book. She did not die in vain.

Dedication

I dedicate this book again to my youngest sister, Roberta.

She gave her wit, courage, charm, and inspiration to me and my family while facing her greatest life challenge.

Thank you to her for letting me always be myself; for being patient and positive with me; and for trusting in God to inspire both of us to follow our dreams.

This work is hers as well as mine, and I thank her again for all her many gifts of sisterhood I share here now. She truly is my beacon of light on this journey of life.

Say only what is good and helpful to those you are talking to,

and what will give them a blessing.

—The Book of Ephesians

Twenty Years Later

Grief

My sister Roberta died of complications from lung cancer in our hometown of St. Ignace, in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Twenty years has passed, yet I continue to feel parts of my grief. I didn’t go back for her funeral, but I was there for her six weeks earlier to say goodbye.

It was terrifying to be in Arizona alone, helpless and emotionally spent, when she passed away. Her two-year battle with lung cancer, an aggressive killer, was hard-fought. She gave a hell of a good fight against insurmountable odds and a vicious cancer most cannot beat. Courage and tenacity are usually not enough for low-survival-rate cancer.

The various stages of grief eventually took me on a journey to gratitude. Conflicted about the way she was treated and how things were being handled, I made suggestions for her care, but in the end, as her sister, the decisions were not mine to make. I live with that reality.

My grief intensified as I watched her struggle in those early months. Today, I still feel sadness when I reflect on what could have been her life. I’ve lived twenty-five years longer than she did. The grief process does not flow in the same order for everyone. Her seemingly senseless death helped me see the path for the story of my life.

Shock

Shock is disbelief. It lasted for me for more than a year after her first round of treatments. Then the cancer came back in her brain. Not much shocks me anymore. Initially her diagnosis gave me migraines and vertigo. The vertigo lasted six months. It wasn’t constant, but it interrupted my life. After twenty years of various medications, more sleep, exercise, and yoga, I have migraines only on occasion. They are less and less, but they may never go away. The shock of her terminal illness subsided, but it took a lot of time. The fragility of life and the suddenness of death are always on my radar.

Twenty years ago, the odds were a ten percent recovery rate for a woman over forty with lung cancer. She smoked for ten years; she quit twelve years before her diagnosis. The American Lung Association once touted that quitting made a difference. We believed it. I don’t blame her for the smoking. She was influenced by Madison Avenue marketing. According to the American Lung Association, every year twice as many women die of lung cancer than breast cancer.

My grief for her over these past twenty years has not been in a single instance or a predictable time of pain or sadness. My grief continued with intensity long past the acceptance of her situation. She had a tough road ahead. I often went inside myself and isolated from friends when there was unbearable pain. Today, with decades between her death and my life, I pray for gratitude before I start my day.

Denial

The year before her death, our entire family spent Christmas together at home. She was recovering from the lung surgery and undergoing chemo. She was bald, but still beautiful. It was a special time even though we saw this sad story unfolding. My heart still aches when I acknowledge this was our last family Christmas. The dynamics are not the same without her. There’s a piece of the family puzzle forever missing, a shift that will never come back around.

That Christmas I talked to her to learn about her surgery, her treatments, and her struggles, and blocked out the idea of her dying. I came home to Arizona and consumed myself with buffers such as my work and my friends, but they didn’t help. The situation was grim.

We grew closer when she came to visit me that next fall. She was in remission. I questioned her circumstances and evaluated my own immortality, and prayed her remission meant hope. We went out to eat with my friends, went shopping, and sat by the pool to talk. We enjoyed horseback riding at South Mountain Park. It’s clear to me now. My denial was strong.

We all grieve in different ways. Not being able to cry outwardly seemed strange to me, but I cried on the inside. I still do that today, feeling grief deep in my chest. I had that heavy ache many times early on, even a numbness in my left arm. My grief changes as the years go by, but I take it with me. I don’t try to explain it to anyone unless they ask me.

Guilt

Choose fond memories and happier times, not guilt and shame. That is my mantra today. My thoughts of when we were young girls growing up in a small northern town in Michigan are happy memories. By grieving in various stages, I worked through my guilt of what I could have done to help her more. I remember her as the beautiful person she was and take pleasure in hearing generous comments from her friends who loved her. Comments such as she made me laugh a lot or she was a good person and loved her boys.

Guilt within your grief journey is unique and personal for a sibling separated by distance. This loss was an opportunity for me to see what wasn’t alive in me. Siblings are our first relationship and a part of us from the beginning. She was likely the person who knew me better than anyone in the family.

We do the best we can at the time. That is all we can do.

If you had a difficult relationship, such as with a parent or sibling, you may be mourning the relationship you wished you had. Yes, I have some regrets with my sister, we didn’t spend enough time with each other. Distance across the country did not allow for us to see each very often. We only had the telephone, or letter writing, not the Internet or text messaging or FaceTime. She would have loved that kind of communication!

Today I choose to remember her patience, tolerance, and kindness, and how we became good friends later in life. These thoughts keep me from the roller-coaster ride of sadness and the ups and downs of recurring grief. They put me on an even keel through life, and I smile when I think of her all these years later as I live a little for her, too.

Anger

It was so painful to lose her that I still remember emotionally and physically how I felt, and how angry I was in the early years. I no longer redirect my anger toward anyone, or to her for leaving. After her death, though, I spent a long time asking why it had happened, questioning the anger, and trying to understand it. All of this eventually subsided. I accept God’s will with this brutal reality. I am no longer furious at God. Grief with this illness took its toll with the anticipation that cancer-free might happen. There was anger when it didn’t.

Now that twenty years has gone by, I divert my anger more constructively into advocacy work. I have more patience. This helps with the anger part of grief and with why God took her rather than me or somebody else. Why her sons had to grow up without their mother is an unanswered question. What lessons I will learn are still being revealed. I knew loneliness, but that too diminished with time and faith. It is not for me to question God, but to find a place of peace through prayer. I returned to yoga, a true healer of the soul.

Bargaining

I bargained with God many times, saying, If only this could be done… but her doctors and family did otherwise. I resented a more holistic approach was not used, treating the mind, body, and spirit. My bargaining had to stop. After a lot of soul searching and praying, I came to realize making a deal with God is not the way it works. I control only myself.

After working on this memoir for a few years, I saw the miracles and the joys of a life well lived. I wasn’t so eager to bargain with God about my life. I sobbed for all those grieving; for my grief, sadness, and fears; and then I wrote the rest of the book feeling free. I reflected on her and our relationship, and worked to be more grateful with my writing.

She died with grace, never complaining and always appreciating the many kind ways people supported her. She didn’t get angry with God for taking her first, even though she was the youngest. Her faith sustains me as I remember how calm she was under fire. I get closer to being done grieving her, but some grief remains for the tomorrows she will never enjoy.

Depression

Being there at the time of her death was not right for me. I accept that decision. In fact, it was impossible for me to plan that trip. I was depressed. It contributed to my staying away. Grief came to my spirit long before I knew she was terminal, but the depression hit me hard after I visited her that previous summer knowing I had seen her for the last time. I couldn’t explain anything to myself or find the answers anywhere, not even with God.

In my bouts of depression, both before she died and after, I neglected myself. I took myself to low points thinking about what I might have done to help her. I reflected on everything and didn’t move on with my life for a long time. I fed my depression.

Today, I would do some things differently, but not trade the ten days I shared with her that summer. We talked some, even though she slept a lot. We shared quiet time, too. Depression ran over me as I saw her shallow breathing, wondering if it would cease in her sleep.

We had a very difficult moment, too, when I took her to the emergency room (ER) as she needed saline and care I could not give her. I felt helpless and more depressed than I realized.

Years later, I came to terms with what God dealt her, long after I kissed her goodbye for the final time. It was heart wrenching for both of us. I can see her face holding all that pain, and I live with that memory.

Acceptance

We all don’t go easily to acceptance, at least not at the same time. We make our own peace with death. When we allow ourselves to feel that space and not inhibit the healing, we move forward to a place where we can live.

If you’ve lost someone, keep the faith, things do get